INSTANT MBA: Decisions Should Be Based On Intuition AND Data

Today's advice comes from Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and founder of Square:

"One of my greatest lessons I learned in running Twitter and starting and running Square was how important it is to instrument all usage.

"For the first two years of Twitter's life, we were flying blind...We were basing everything on intuition instead of having a good balance between intuition and data. We were going down all the time because of it.

"So the first thing I wrote for Square was an admin dashboard. We have a very strong discipline within the company, which is now 72 people, to log everything, to measure everything and to test everything. We treat the dashboard, we treat the analytics, we treat the data as a product. All that data is really, really interesting. It speaks to a market that's never been addressed. 94% of commerce is still offline. So it's a massive market and they have no tools whatsoever. "

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